6 Responses to What Chief Data Officers Do (Infographic)

Sorry, but this appears to be a fictional character to me. The CEO is accountable for all Strategic Initiatives and their Outcomes. In today’s enterprise most of these can only be achieved by the successful exploitation of Data & Analytics. We need Data Leadership, not a Fashion Statement.

Richard, here’s just one example of how non-fictional CDOs are: since 2006, MIT has organized a well-attended annual conference for these “fictional characters” in which they talk about their real-world challenges and how they solve them.http://www.mitcdoiq.org/

Aviva, here’s the abstract of the session on exactly this topic from the MITCDOIQ event in 2013

CDOs in the C-Suite – Who Does the CDO Report To?
Abstract: CDO is a relatively new title, and one that potentially causes cultural clashes with not only the corporate CIO, but also potentially the Chief Compliance Officer, Chief Privacy Officer, Chief Information Security Officer and even the Chief Marketing Officer. Where should the CDO “sit” in the organization? Is the title even necessary, or sufficient? With perspectives from private industry (in both the healthcare and financial services domains), from the standards world, from the government world and from an IT products & services company, this panel will address how the CDO’s requirements best fit into the executive suite, who the CDO should report to, and how the CDO can best carry out the data governance and data exploitation role in today’s corporate environments.

As far as I recall there was no agreement among participants regarding who should the CDO report to. In practice, it depends on the industry and on how important data governance is considered by the organization. My impression is that typically this position does not report to the CIO.